The Heft of a Novel

So, yes, Winter Fugue is underway. How has it taken its first few steps into being? I don’t mean “being” as a concept; I mean “being” as a synonym for pixels and ink. Beyond the emergence of the work of fiction as a flickering response to the raw and burning imperative to write, how does it — how has it — come to assume a definite form on the page?

For me, the first words of a fiction never issue from an idea or an image, or a narrative dilemma, but always — strange to say — from a feeling in the body, a mood that circulates through blood and breath, an incarnate sensation in no way tethered to events in the outside world. They come on top of the murmur that drives the act of writing and they take shape in response to, or in mimicry of, an inner disturbance that feels physically like the growth of some alien thing, some subcutaneous burr, lodged in the fibres of muscle and flesh. Marilynne Robinson gives voice to an experience of much the same sensation in her most recent collection of essays, The Givenness of Things:

In writing I have often felt as though I am my mind’s amanuensis, in reading its researcher, in repose its slightly dull companion. I feel a novel begin to cohere in my mind before I know much more about it than that it has the heft of a long narrative. This heft is a physical sensation. A forming novel is a dense atmosphere more than it is a concept or an idea. I find my way into it by finding a voice that can tell it, and then it unfolds within the constraints of its own nature, which seem arbitrary to me but inviolable by me. When I lose the sense of them everything goes wrong. I suppose it is inevitable that I should think of a fiction as a small model of the simulacrum of reality that is given to us by sense and perception, and as a way to probe anomalies that emerge in the assumed world when it is under scrutiny. But this is only a hypothesis, an attempt to account for a phenomenon I cannot will and, in an important degree, do not control.

Because this sensation is physical, it has, for me, a shape that can be felt out. By this I mean that it has, or at least suggests, a palpable form, a form that possesses contours and branches which conjoin in various places and in various proportions to one another. This form is the closest thing to a story that I ever really feel. Its contours are the events of a narrative, and its branches are the scenes in which the narrative might be rendered. Where those branches conjoin are the places where events connect, sometimes causally, sometimes tacitly, and the branches grow out into different proportions depending on the duration of various scenes and their relative significance. But the events themselves always arrive at a later stage, piecemeal. The shape of the whole comes first, making itself known by its heft in my body, and there it opens up a complex of interlocking spaces that events trickle into over time.